EAT stands for Expertise, Authority and (Trust) Trust — three factors Google uses to measure the trust it should place in a brand or website.
Google wants to give its customers (search engine users) the best experience possible. So you only want to promote sites you fully trust.
Domains and companies with the best display of their Expertise, Authority and Trust shouldn't just see themselves promoted by Google. But this should also correlate and result in greater trust and purchases by a company's target audience.
Sites can improve their EAT display on their own
Improving the EAT of a brand or website is reflected in greater brand awareness and feeling. Which, again, should lead to an increase in sales and revenue. Still not sure what EAT really means for your business' SEO strategy? Keep reading this article!
What does the acronym EAT mean?
The acronym EAT stands for Expertise, Authority and (Trust) Trust, and was created by Google.
Each of these three words represents a measure of a company's right to be considered a leader in its field. It doesn't matter what industry or niche they might fall into.
Google is using each of these three metrics to measure a site's experience, authority or trustworthiness, the individual content of the site's page (in a URL per URL), and the content creator itself.
Expertise
Expertise is defined as "Ability or specialized knowledge in a particular field." If you offer a service or product about which you have in-depth knowledge, you can be classified as an expert in that area. Especially if you can demonstrate that your level of knowledge matches or exceeds your competition.
If you and your competitors were in a competition and had to individually demonstrate to a client how deep your knowledge goes, the strength and depth of your vision would make you stand out.
If you know more about plumbing than the person next to you, you will stand out.
No matter what the subject, if you demonstrate your level of experience as higher than the next person, you will be chosen as an expert. Your website is under the same judgment.
Your website and pages are being examined to see if it or the pages on it demonstrate a higher level of experience than other websites or pages Google finds on the internet.
Authorization
Likewise, an authority — or “authority” — is a person or website who is ” Capable of being trusted as being accurate or truthful; reliable."
Insofar as “expertise” is a measure of the level of knowledge or skill, authority is measured to see how well you, your brand or business, or your website and the content within it stand out from the other options.
When you have a question about food, you may have a friend you turn to for advice.
When people search the internet, they look for an authority who can give them answers they can trust.
They don't just want to trust the expertise of these people or brands. But they also want to make sure they're the best person to go to, similar to our identity parade schedule from before.
Google is examining its brand, its website and its content to determine if it's not just expert-written content, but also the leading authority or authoritative content available.
(Trust) Reliability
"The ability to recognize you as honest or truthful" is the measure of how much credibility your brand, website or content has.
It's one thing to create a lot of content on the internet, but another thing to be trustworthy.
If someone offers us a deal that sounds too good to be true, we immediately lose confidence in the person offering it. Lost trust is rarely regained.
Google now measures — and has always measured — trust in a website based on backlinks detected from other domains. The greater the trust in the domain's linkers, the more trust it places on the domain's link.
Where does EAT come from?
The acronym EAT comes from a set of publicly available guidelines published by Google for the educational benefit of its quality assurance team or, as Google calls them, the “Search Quality” team.
Research Quality Evaluators
The role of Research Quality Assessors is similar to that of a Quality Assurance team in any company, large or small.
Your task is to check the quality of the search results after any changes the Search Engine and Algorithm engineering team of computer science engineers might make.
As an example, Google's algorithm that deploys around the world and available in almost 150 different languages. Each will use the mechanics of the main algorithm to work, but each will have separate requirements for its user base.
Because of this, each language will have a team that experiences changes specific to their needs, which they will want to test independently of the core algorithm.
Meanwhile, the core algorithms team will also have changes of their own to test, some of which will be pushed to the other search engine language teams.
In total, there can be anywhere from half a dozen to two dozen changes taking place daily, perhaps almost every hour.
Research quality evaluators are in place to verify that the code change works as planned.
They pay attention to how results improve or decline after each change.
If the results have diminished in quality, they will notify the engineers, who will make some adjustments and make an improvement. This is an ongoing and cyclical process.
Why EAT is so important
If your accountant lacks experience, authority and confidence, you are likely to look for an alternative. Google users are the same.
When they find a domain or page that lacks experience, authority and trust, they look for an alternative (in the form of another page or maybe even a different search engine).
Google is training the algorithm to look at these metrics and use them as signals to determine whether they should trust a company's domain or webpages to satisfy their users' needs.
If they don't meet those needs, Google will choose someone else to do it.
Simply put, if Google finds another domain or page that provides a better customer experience than yours, Google will promote them instead.
We're talking about lost rankings, lost traffic, but also lost revenue.
For some industries, these requirements to provide a high level of content and user experience are multiplied.
Google uses the acronym YMYL to categorize these types of industries in addition to the search queries related to them.
What does the acronym YMYL mean?
The acronym YMYL stands for Your Money, Your Life. This categorizes industries and search queries that may result in the searcher entrusting your money or your life (ie, your health and well-being) to you.
Why YMYL guidelines apply to you too
If everyone holds themselves to a higher standard, we all benefit. If all of our websites and content pages are made using the same high quality requirements, then everyone using the internet benefits — not just our target audience, but the internet as a whole.
It doesn't matter if you think your small e-commerce site doesn't need to follow YMYL or EAT. Or if your business adopts a simple one-page website — “it's just over there for contact details and doesn't sell anything” — all domains must show that it can be trusted by people and Google.
Conclusion
What we can take away from this is that it doesn't matter how cheap your products or services are: you're asking people to trust you with their money. Then, Google hopes you will earn a person's trust by demonstrating the reasons why you should display pages on your site.
EAT and YMYL infiltrate everything. So it's best that we optimize for them anyway and improve our quality of service — and potential ratings — for everyone's benefit.
Invest in your content and invest in your team, and the expertise, authority and trust you establish will lead to ranking and revenue improvements over time.
With Colors Agency, we guarantee much more than just an attractive look and a modern layout for your website.
Thus, our main focus is to offer companies around the world effective solutions to generate visibility on the internet.
Our agency develops SEO strategies as well as brand positioning for multinational companies, large, medium and small, all projects are important to us.
